No More Learning

Compare, for instance, the
following: he is describing the love-wasted Elaine, as she sits brooding
in the lonely evening, with the shadow of the wished-for death falling
on her:--

But when they left her to herself again,
Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field,
Approaching through the darkness, call'd; the owls
Wailing had power upon her, and she mix'd
Her fancies with the sallow-rifted glooms
Of evening and the moanings of the wind.


How exactly does this recall, in a manner to be felt rather than exactly
defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil's
picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon
her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and "mixes
her fancies" with the glooms of night and the owl's funereal wail:--

Hinc exaudiri voces et verba vocantis
Visa viri, nox quum terras obscura teneret;
Solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo
Saepe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces.

--'Aen'. , iv. , 460.

(From it she thought she clearly heard a voice, even the accents of
her husband calling her when night was wrapping the earth with
darkness; and on the roof the lonely owl in funereal strains kept oft
complaining, drawing out into a wail its protracted notes. )

Similar passages, though not so striking, would be the picture of
Pindar's Elysium in 'Tiresias', the sentiment pervading 'The Lotos
Eaters' transferred so faithfully from the Greek poets, the scenery in
'? none' so crowded with details from Homer, Theocritus and Callimachus.
Sometimes we find similes suggested by the classical poets, but enriched
by touches from original observation, as here in 'The Princess':--

As one that climbs a peak to gaze
O'er land and main, and sees a great black cloud
Drag inward from the deeps, a wall of night
Blot out the slope of sea from verge to shore.
. . .
And quenching lake by lake and tarn by tarn Expunge the world,


which was plainly suggested by Homer, iv. , 275:--

[Greek: hos d' hot apo skopiaes eide nephos aipolos anaer
erchomenon kata ponton hupo Zephuroio i_oaes tps de t' aneuthen eonti,
melanteron aeute pissa, phainet ion kata ponton, agei de te lailapa
pollaen. ]

(As when a goat-herd from some hill-peak sees a cloud coming across
the deep with the blast of the west wind behind it; and to him, being
as he is afar, it seems blacker, even as pitch, as it goes along the
deep, bringing with it a great whirlwind.
)


So again the fine simile in 'Elaine', beginning

Bare as a wild wave in the wide North Sea,


is at least modelled on the simile in 'Iliad', xv. , 381-4, with
reminiscences of the same similes in 'Iliad', xv. , 624, and 'Iliad',
iv. , 42-56. The simile in the first section of the 'Princess',

As when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,


reminds us of Homer's

[Greek: hos d' ote kinaesae Zephyros Bathulaeion, elthon labros,
epaigixon, epi t' aemuei astachuessin]

(As when the west wind tosses a deep cornfield rushing down with
furious blast, and it bows with all its ears. )


Nothing could be more happy than such an adaptation as the following--

Ever fail'd to draw
The quiet night into her blood,


from Virgil, 'Aen'. , iv. , 530:--

Neque unquam Solvitur in somnos _oculisve aut pectore noctem
Accipit_.

(And she never relaxes into sleep, or receives the night in eyes or
bosom),


or than the following (in 'Enid') from Theocritus:--

Arms on which the standing muscle sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it.

[Greek: en de mues stereoisi brachiosin akron hyp' _omon estasan,
aeute petroi oloitrochoi ous te kylind_on cheimarrhous potamos
megalais periexese dinais. ]

--'Idyll', xxii. , 48 'seq. '

(And the muscles on his brawny arms close under the shoulder stood out
like boulders which the wintry torrent has rolled and worn smooth with
the mighty eddies. )

But there was another use to which Tennyson applied his accurate and
intimate acquaintance with the classics. It lay in developing what was
suggested by them, in unfolding, so to speak, what was furled in their
imagery. Nothing is more striking in ancient classical poetry than its
pregnant condensation.